The handful of sportswriters who had retreated to the basement press room for the ending of yesterday’s Yankees-Braves game were staring intently at the overhead television screen when the baseball writer from the so-called Paper of Record suddenly stood up.

“Gentlemen, we are covering a baseball game,” he announced crisply while reaching up to change the channel.

And just like that, the disheartening images from Martha’s Vineyard gave way to the sight of Brian Jordan popping out to Tino Martinez to nail down the Yankees’ 11-4 victory.

Somehow, it didn’t seem all that important.

In fact, nothing that happened at the ballpark in The Bronx seemed very important once the news began to filter in that a plane piloted by John F. Kennedy Jr. had apparently gone down in the sea.

Every so often, real life pokes its nose into the toy department known as professional sports.

It happened five years ago when the world’s attention on Game 5 of the NBA Finals between the Knicks and Rockets was rudely interrupted by O.J. Simpson going for a drive in his Bronco.

And it happened again yesterday when the Yankees and Braves had a ball game to play while something much more important was going on a couple of hundred miles to the north.

In truth, something more important than a ball game is always going on, but this one was unfolding before our eyes, involving someone many of us had seen grow up although few of could claim we actually knew.

And from the moment before the game when PA announcer Bob Sheppard asked the crowd to rise in a moment of silent prayer, everything that happened between the chalk lines seemed to be reduced to a sideshow.

“I had met him in passing, but I couldn’t say I knew him,” said David Cone. “Still, it’s sad, and it’s eerie.”

Many of the Yankees echoed Cone’s feelings. It was eerie, since just three nights ago, Kennedy had come to the opener of the Yankees-Braves series, the night Atlanta lit up Roger Clemens.

Clemens was among the Yankees who felt a connection to the story, since he fancies himself something of a Kennedy-phile. He also has another odd, even eerie, connection to the history of Kennedy tragedy: His wife, Debra, a Dallas native, happened to be in Dealey Plaza as a child with her mother the day President Kennedy was killed by an assassin.

Yesterday, after an important win over the Braves, a knot of players stood huddled in their private lounge before a big-screen television, but instead of the usual fare, a sports highlight show, they were watching the news broadcasts of the search for survivors.

“Did they find the body?,” asked Andy Pettitte, who had just won his first game in nearly a month. “It just shows you never know when you’re going to have your last day here.”

“If there ever was a reason for living you life one day at a time, this was it,” said Joe Torre. “It slaps you back to reality.”

Torre, of course, knows reality from his pre-season battle with prostate cancer. “We just never know when any of us will be taken,” he said.

Thursday night, Kennedy had sat in a field-level box seat alongside the Yankee dugout, and many of the players, accustomed to seeing celebrities at their games and even hanging out with them after hours, took the time to take a look.

“I saw him here the other night,” said Paul O’Neill. “You think you got life by the hand, and the next thing you know, you’re missing. It’s a terrible thing. That family just seems to be snake-bitten.”

“It makes you realize how fragile we all are,” Bernie Williams said. “And it reminds you how baseball plays such a small part compared to the things that are really important, like your family and your life.”